Wednesday, May 16, 2012

I am tired of organizations trying to stop their employees from accessing sites like Facebook, MySpace, linkedin and even blogspot and lots of other websites that contain useful work related information. If someone is going to waste time while on job, they will find other ways to do so. Blocking these websites wont change a thing.
If you happen to work in such an organization or if you just want to remain anonymous while browsing online, Tor is what you are looking for. From their home page

"Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and organization state security known as traffic analysis"

Tor accomplishes this by routing your traffic through intermediate nodes(called relays) so someone watching your internet connection wont know which sites you are visiting and the sites you visit wont know your physical location.
Its realy easy to setup Tor on your machine. Below are the steps to use Tor with Chrome on windows machine.

Download Tor from their download page and install it. You will need the Vidalia Bundle

Run Vidalia. This will bring up the Vidalia Control Panel. let it connect to the relay network. When its done minimize it.

Now open Chrome and install Proxy Switch from Chrome Webstore. This is a proxy manager and it will enable you to switch to using Tor by a single click.

Open options for Proxy Switchy and add a proxy profile. Name it Tor for easy reference and point it to 127.0.0.1:8118

and thats it. Now when you want to switch to anonymous browsing, just click on the Proxy Switchy icon on the address bar and select the Tor profile and you will be anonymous.